But first, an examination for how I did with my resolutions last year:

I, the guilt party, do henceforth solemnly swear to make a concerted effort to write on a steady basis.
I was doing all right until, you know, I stopped in October-ish. So this past year more has been written for just me than I think I’ve ever really done before. Not too bad. All in all, I’d give myself a B- on this one.

I will stop giving head-space to other people’s storylands and expand on my own.Actually did a decent job this year on this one. My D&D campaign actually has back story! And my own stories are better for it, as well.

I will push my boundaries, and sometimes I will fail, but I will learn something from having gone further than I’ve ever gone before.This year I picked up some new hobbies, including some things I swore I would NEVER EVER do. Good job, me!

I will actually get off my butt and exercise .Sword club counts as exercise, right? I go for lots of walks (especially when working on my other resolution on developing my own stories), and even run sometimes. Exercise! Healthy living!

I will change the world, in small mysterious ways.Uhm, maybe? I don’t even know what I meant by this one, so… probably did not succeed.

My resolutions for the new year?
1) Start and see a new project through to completion. I don’t know what it will be yet, but I’ve been itching to work on something different for a while.
2) Get better at fighting hand-to-hand/grappling
3) Figure out new and better ways to DM my ever-growing hoard.
4) Make one really awesome costume this year, instead of just talking about it like I always do.
5) Get caught up to the current timeline with the campaign summaries on this blog (this one will probably not happen).
6) Failing number five, I will at least try to post more often here. Given my current track record, this could be as often as TWO times a month.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the individual characters in the campaign, and just trying to figure out what makes them ‘tick.’ I think I have some characters figured out quite well, but others… well… not so much. To try to get a feel for where all the characters stand, plot-wise, I made a spreadsheet. Of course.

Ooh, ooh, time to play 'guess which characters I know stuff about!' I messed around with these columns a bit, so some items are in different character's columns.

So, okay, having used science to figure out what areas I’m lacking in, I came to the realization that the characters that I know how I’m going to use in the future are the players that I’ve talked to on IM (both in and out of game) about their characters.

So what does that mean? I need to bother more players about their characters outside the game. I like non-verbal communication. Some people have clearer character concepts than others. This is not news. At least it’s not to me.

We’re changing things up soon, which is always exciting (and slightly frightening). Things are going to be hectic, I imagine. Maybe now is not the time to be focusing on this sort of issue. I don’t know.

This morning, I woke up with a story idea in my head. A complete story, with beginning, middle, and end. Characters, plot twists, climaxes– the story was ready to go. And despite it all, this troubles me, since this normally isn’t how I operate.

Stories, for me, start as a single image, a frame in a comic book. Perhaps there’s some dialogue, perhaps not. From that one image, I need expand the story. And it’s a long, hard process filled with rewrites, thrown out pages, and bad writing. But in the end, I’m proud of my writing, knowing that I’ve fought with it until it’s the best it could possibly be.

So to have something come easily… I don’t know why that bothers me so much. Maybe it’s part of my personal belief system that anything worth doing is worth working hard for. I want to earn each victory, knowing that I got it through honest work and not through blind luck or drifting by on talent. Perhaps that’s a foolish way to think. Perhaps I’ve just read too much Robert Browning in my youth, and I let it color my approach to life.

Perhaps it’s nothing. Perhaps this story will be as hard a work as the ones that have come before it, just better planned out than normal. Perhaps I’m just getting worked up over a non-issue. Perhaps.

Eh, so some personal stuff has gotten me pretty stressed out at the moment. Stressed enough to kill to not write anything worthy of being published. So instead of getting ahead in my work last night, I watched Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and doodled away. Here’s a rough sketch I’m thinking of inking and painting.

Apologies for the poor quality-- it's the best I could do with my camera phone.

Really, I just want to play with watercolors again, and her color palate really pops. Anyway, regularly scheduled stuff will return at, uhm, some point.